From Puducherry's Cracks to the Selection Room: Why Shams Mulani's 279 Wickets Are Not Enough

When the Puducherry pitch began to crack in the fourth innings, the scorecard started telling a strange story. Seven of the Australia A players had already played Test cricket, led by a man with twenty Tests behind him, Peter Handscomb. Yet the Player of the Series was a domestic spinner who had been kept out of the national conversation for two years. I opened the scorecard just to count wickets, and it handed me a life instead — a life of patience, waiting, and a left-arm spinner standing in the most crowded lane in Indian cricket.

Shams Mulani, Mumbai's left-arm orthodox spinner, is 29. In First-Class cricket he has 279 wickets in 61 matches, an average of 4.57 per game. Add 2,632 runs at 31.71. That is where I stopped first — four-and-a-half wickets a match is not rare in Indian domestic cricket, but a lower-order spinner batting at nearly thirty-two genuinely is. That second number is what turns him from a specialist into an all-rounder.

You need the pipeline picture. Ravindra Jadeja, Axar Patel and Kuldeep Yadav remain incumbents. Then there is Manav Suthar, who has already made a bright Test start and moved ahead in the line. Behind them sit Harsh Dubey, Sai Kishore and Nishant Sindhu. And outside this crowd stands Mulani. This is not a bilateral contest; it is an internal queue — and in that queue, left-arm orthodox spin is the most crowded lane of all.

So I fixed the central question before drafting: is Mulani's selection a matter of form, or of timing? Because the congestion inside his own team is his biggest opponent, not any batter. Jadeja, Axar, Suthar, Mulani — almost the same template, so he is not filling a rare gap; he is trying to enter the most populated room.

Now line up the numbers. Across five seasons from 2026-22 to 2026-26 his wickets read 45, 46, 35, 44, 30. Two things hide here. First, consistency. He never exploded in a season, but he never collapsed either; he stayed in a stable band of 35 to 46. Second, the final figure of 30 — the lowest of the five-year window. That 30 is my biggest caution, but a conditional one — if the season is still incomplete the number means nothing; if it is complete, it signals a drop from a baseline near 44. No decline verdict should be reached without that verification.

Compare him with his rivals. Suthar has 179 wickets in 38 matches, 4.71 a game. Sai Kishore has 245 in 60, 4.08 a game. Mulani sits at 4.57, right between them. In volume he is not behind, but in efficiency he is marginally behind Suthar. At such a fine margin the tiebreaker is never raw wicket count; it is batting, or conditions.

And that is exactly where Mulani's real asset lies. 2,632 runs at 31.71 means he carries a dual-role profile like Jadeja or Axar — a left-arm spinner who can bat. For home Tests, Indian selection has historically prized this two-in-one profile. So the batting average may matter more than the wicket count.

Look closer at the Australia A performance. In Puducherry he took a seven-wicket match haul, and in another game three wickets plus 29 runs. In his own words the method was deliberate pace variation so visiting batters could not settle, then in the fourth innings on a cracked surface he put the ball in the right areas and let the wicket do the rest. That is the classic two-mode red-ball spinner — a holding role early, an attacking role late.

But honesty is required. Being Player of the Series against Australia A is a flash from a small sample, not an established trend. It is a re-entry burst after a two-year absence. And the performance came on a deck that assisted spin in the fourth innings — there is no data on whether the same result follows on a flat or seaming pitch. That is my deepest doubt: if Suthar consolidates his Test spot in the left-arm spin lane, the door for the next left-arm spinner could stay shut for three to five years.

From my years of watching matches, one thing is certain — in Indian domestic cricket, 279 wickets mean you are inside the system, but whether the system calls you is never decided by your numbers alone. Mulani is 29, the prime of a spinner. His realistic window may be the next two seasons, and the only condition is an opening in Jadeja's or Axar's place. This is a waiting game, and a first chance is not a finish line; it is a door left ajar.

He himself says the selection process is not in his hands, but that he will be ready when the call comes. That mindset is admirable, and tactically smart too — knocking on the door just before the Ranji season is a familiar, legitimate move. Mumbai's Deshpande-Kotian-Mulani trio is primed together, a comfortable environment for him.

One last word on data. Data without a name is just noise. 279 wickets, a 31.71 average, a Player of the Series award — these numbers make Mulani's case reasonable, but the selection decision will be made by structure, timing and that invisible queue inside selectors' heads. So the question is not whether Mulani is good enough; the question is whether the selectors will remember the name of the best spinner waiting in India's most crowded lane, or whether the next cracked pitch will also keep him in domestic cricket.